The invention concerns a file or database manager and systems based thereon.
In their attempts at automated apprehension of the meaning of speech and text, neither linguists nor computer scientists have made much progress. They have concentrated too much on the logical structure of the texts themselves and have neglected the structure of the world. Speech and textual information are obviously based on the structure of the world and refer to it.
Quite some progress has been made in phonological and/or phonetical, lexical, morphological, and syntactical analyses of natural language processing. However, when it comes to understanding the meaning of speech, i.e. the semantical interpretation of speech, the breakthrough has not yet been achieved. As a consequence, the pragmatical analysis, the control of tools and devices by natural speech or text, has also not been developed very far.
A typical example of a modern speech/text recognition system is described in the article xe2x80x9cEnabling agents to work togetherxe2x80x9d, by R. V. Guha et al., Communications of the ACM, Vol. 37, No. 7, July 1994, pp. 127-142, and reviewed by T. J. Schult in the German article xe2x80x9cTransparente Trivialitxc3xa4ten; Cyc-Wissensbasis in WWWxe2x80x9d, c""t 1996, Vol. 10, pp. 118-121. The Cyc-system described by R. V. Guha is a knowledge based system for true/false categorization of input statements. T. J. Schult points out in his article that the knowledge representation in the database used in the Cyc-system is not standardized and uses only the following relations for deduction: xe2x80x98is element ofxe2x80x99, xe2x80x98is subset ofxe2x80x99, and xe2x80x98has subsetsxe2x80x99.
The interaction between human beings and machines, such as computer systems, are the subject of extensive research activities. Ease of use is a is a key aspect of such research activities.
A typical computer system comprises a central processing unit, memory, peripheral devices such as data input/output devices and storage media such as floppy disks or hard disks. The devices communicate with each other via a computer operating system. Computer operating systems include several different operational modules. One such module might be a file manager. Client data stored on a storage medium is organized as a file system having an associated format, and the file manager is employed to control the access to the file systems. The file manager provides file system access to clients using various software via Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) adapted to the software. For example, the file manager may include an Apple Computer, Inc. API to interface with Apple software or an MS-DOS INT 21 API (Microsoft Disk Operating System) to interface with DOS software.
The file system stores, organizes and describes client data. The client data is stored in files. The files are arranged in each file system in a particular format. Each file system maintains its organization and description information, referred to as metadata, in format specific structures. Examples of such formats are HFS, MS-DOS FAT, ProDOS, High Sierra, ISO 9660, NTFS, and so on. The term format encompasses both physical disk format and network server access protocols.
To read and write data from and to the file system, the file manager must be able to recognize the format of the file system.
A typical example of a file system and file manager is addressed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,355,497. This patent concerns a directory structure that represents the xe2x80x98real worldxe2x80x99. The xe2x80x98real worldxe2x80x99 is structure in the form of a tree and the items of the xe2x80x98real worldxe2x80x99 structure are physical items such as file cabinets, folders, etc. It appears that the structure of this xe2x80x98real worldxe2x80x99 has a one-to-one correspondence with an underlying file structure. According to this U.S. Patent information about a file is entered manually by the user into a predefined collection of fields. This is done at the time when the respective file is saved to disk. The user must provide the file location. It is a disadvantage of this and similar systems and schemes that keywords and other identifiers have to be generated by a user and are thus unpredictable. These kind of systems and schemes only work well if the user is able to remember previously used keywords, otherwise file retrieval is a difficult and time consuming. The system according to U.S. Pat. No. 5,355,497 does not address an automatic categorization of files. Ease of use-is also an important-aspect in designing database products.
It is a well know disadvantage of known file and database systems that as the amount of files or database entries increases the handling becomes more and more cumbersome. Easy access or retrieval, simple and fast storing files or recording entries, and a clear overview of the whole file or database system are crucial.
It is an objective of the present invention to provide a scheme for adding elements to a database system.
It is an objective of the present invention to provide a scheme for acting upon elements in a database system.
It is an objective of the present invention to provide a new structure for the representation of knowledge in a database system that allows for ease of handling elements in the database, e.g. when adding an element or when discovering/retrieving an element
It is another objective of the present invention to provide a system or scheme for effective searching and discovery of elements in a database (e.g. files in a directory).
The objectives of the present invention have been accomplished by the methods, computer program products, computer program elements, and database systems as claimed.
Advantages of the present invention are addressed in connection with the detailed description or are apparent from the description.